For immigrants craving home, no place like Tropical Star

Tropical star restaurant and specialty market

To the uninitiated nostril, the smell inside Tropical Star market and restaurant is a mix of grease, spices and flour. That’s what the cooks use for the beef empanadas and maize arepas that are as thick and moist as if they’d come from a street cart in Bogota.

To Raul Castro, 52, it’s the smell of childhood. Castro, who grew up in Colombia, took a friend there for lunch on a recent sunny afternoon.

“He came from TJ. And I came from Oceanside,” he said. The restaurant, in a Clairemont strip mall, is more or less halfway.

For San Diegans yearning for blood sausages and buñuelo mix, for lomo saltado and arepas, and all those starchy vegetables and sugary soft drinks sprung from Latin America’s fertile hillsides and its urban bodegas, there’s no Little Colombia, Argentina, Peru, Brazil, Puerto Rico, El Salvador.

Tropical Star is a little bit of them all. For 17 years, it has offered that feeling of home to the region’s Latin American and Caribbean transplants. Its owners, Amanda and Eric Beniquez, a couple from Puerto Rico (him) and Colombia (her), have carved a niche as one of the few markets in San Diego that sell ingredients from countries south and east of Mexico.

Brazilians are a big chunk of the market’s customers, said the Beniquezes’ daughter, Eilene. She does a little of everything — welcomes guests, waits on tables, works the cash register. The restaurant is popular with people from nearby colleges and hospitals. The biggest contingent is members of the military who spent time in, or came from, Puerto Rico, she added.

Tropical Star

6163 Balboa Ave, San Diego, CA 92111. (858) 874-7827.

“I feel like half of our clientele is military,” Beniquez said. Word gets out on the bases, she said, and when members of the military get stationed at Camp Pendleton, they drive down. “Oh, my friend I was stationed with in Hong Kong told me about this place,” someone might tell her.

Saturdays are the busiest day, Beniquez said. That’s when the restaurant serves ajiaco, a homey chicken soup. “This is just packed,” Beniquez said, taking a minute off between ringing people up and ferrying platters of food from the kitchen. “Doesn’t matter how hot it is.”

Save for a Persian grill a block away, Tropical Star is in something of a culinary desert, and a distance from other ethnic or non-chain options. A mile east there’s Convoy Street, San Diego’s Korea-China-Japantown in all but name.

Originally, the restaurant was just a place to sit and eat. Five tables inside, two outside. The market came later.

“We started with a little shelf,” Beniquez said. “That’s actually the shelf. That’s THE shelf,” she said reverently, standing in front of a small red and white shelf packed with sweet potato chips, coconut candy and Brazilian cookies.

Now the shelf is flanked by longer shelves that run across the longest wall. Their goods get stocked as the result of customer requests, she said. “We started with basic bread (ingredients). People started saying, ‘Why don’t you have that? Why don’t you have that?’ ” Beniquez said.

People also call with special orders. Those can take months to arrive. A man from Coachella who works in San Diego picked up some soda recently. “That gentleman that just left,” Beniquez said that afternoon, “he ordered two cases of Malta, which is a Colombian drink. I’m not a fan of it myself. It’s very sweet. Tastes like root beer.”

Amazon sells some of the same items. Does that cut into the market’s sales? Beniquez said Tropical Star’s prices are competitive, and she speculated that her customers are the type who like face-to-face interaction. Plus, Amazon doesn’t serve her father’s Cubano sandwich, made with pork roasted according to an old family recipe.

It’s a best-seller on the menu.

San Diego, CA, 5/12/14_ Tropical Star .Stacy Stemler, 50, (left) of Bonita enjoys a meal with a co-worker at the Tropical Star restaurant and market in Clairemont. For almost 20 years, Tropical Star has been serving specialties from the Caribbean islands and Latin America in San Diego County. Misael Virgen/ UT San Diego

San Diego, CA, 5/12/14_ Tropical Star .Stacy Stemler, 50, (left) of Bonita enjoys a meal with a co-worker at the Tropical Star restaurant and market in Clairemont. For almost 20 years, Tropical Star has been serving specialties from the Caribbean islands and Latin America in San Diego County. Misael Virgen/ UT San Diego

Like many family businesses, Tropical Star’s story is hard to pull apart from that of its owners. Thriving in a new land after multiple moves and changes. Evolving, adapting. But always glancing longingly toward home. Eric and Amanda met in Brooklyn in 1972. He went to culinary school, she studied liberal arts.

They dreamed of opening a similar business in New York. “They wanted a store, but it would be kind of foolish to open one in New York. It’s all Puerto Rican,” Eilene said. Then they moved to San Diego.

Their first venture was a casual restaurant in University City. Next, a cloth napkin place near Little Italy. It was too fancy for their tastes, so they opened their cozy little hole in the wall. And the family grew — two daughters, one son. Eilene, 24, is the youngest.

During lunch rush hour, you’ll find her and her father working the room. He’s tall and quiet. She’s bubbly, switching between Spanish and English as needed. Amanda runs the business end, ordering whatever the little market and restaurant require and handling special customer requests.

Eric retired a few years ago — for about two weeks. “He was bored, and so he came back to work,” his daughter said. “It‘s very common in our culture. We don’t retire, we die. Sounds really violent, but it’s not. He likes it. … He works a lot less, but people like seeing him here.”

The restaurant is planning its first big shake up since it opened. They’re opening a café in the space next door.

Sometimes, Eilene thinks about her next step. She works at REI, too. She practically grew up in the family business. She was 7 when it opened, in 1997. She studied photography in college and dreams of making a living that way. She’d also like to redecorate. The coral green walls are lively, but she could also go for something more simple, perhaps.

“I’ve been wanting to change it,” she admitted. “But people like it like this, honestly. Because it looks like it’s Puerto Rico. One guy who walked in, I remember, he was like, ‘Oh my God, it’s like my mom’s house. It smells like my mom’s house.’ ”